January 10, 2016 AsktheBuilder Newsletter

The January thaw is happening here in New Hampshire today.

It's not been much of a winter here so far because of a strong El Nino.

Here's what it looked like here about ten days ago when we received our first snow of the season.​

It looked so much better in person. The trees looked as if they were sprayed with white cotton candy.

Heavy rain and a 46F high temperature are about to happen here in a few hours and that will eat away at the light snow.

I NEED Your Help

I try to help you each issue. Now I could use your help.

It appears a European car rental company is trying to make a splash here in the USA.

SIXT

opens in a new windowClick here to visit their site.

I need to rent a car for ten days and they have very attractive rates. That's common when a company wants to break into a market.

But reading some of the reviews of people here in the USA that have rented cars from them have me a little spooked.

Have YOU used SIXT? If so, what's been your experience?

​REPLY to this email ASAP with your story.

Thanks!

Porch Slab Going UP!

What would you think if your porch slab started to go up?

opens in a new windowCLICK HERE to see what I think.

Hip Roof Framing Tip

I doubt you're going to be framing a hip roof this week, but one never knows!

I LOVE framing roofs. Roof framing before it's covered with sheathing looks like the rib cage of a house to me.

Anyway, opens in a new windowCLICK HERE to discover a pretty cool tip about how you calculate the length of the ridge board.

opens in a new windowCLICK HERE to view countless tips of mine.

El Capitan Software Update Apology

About a month ago, I had a minor meltdown and vented here in the newsletter.

I have a very nice MacBook Pro laptop that I inherited from my daughter and use as a backup machine.

I don't use it that much, however in the past few months I started to edit some videos on it.

When I took possession of it twenty-one months ago, I upgraded the RAM to 8 GB and I put in a new hard drive.

It was a solid-state drive (SSD). I knew that these drives had an inherent flaw in that they'd fail if they're used too much. I guess that's the best way to say it. They have a limited number of read/write actions that can happen.

I thought that the El Capitan Apple update borked my machine. Guess what?

The SSD died. It had reached its limit of storing and retrieving data. When you get to a certain point, the drives act like a drunken sailor.

Bottom line: I was WRONG about it being Apple's fault and it's back to SATA spinning platter drives for me.

Can you believe I purchased a SATA drive that's got one terabyte of space on it for under $60? Isn't that insane?

Do your research before you invest in a SSD. Be SURE you're backing up all your data all the time. I do that using the Time Machine software supplied by Apple.

That's enough for today.

Let me know the good, bad or ugly about Sixt if you've used them or know of a friend who did.

Tim Carter
Founder - www.AsktheBuilder.com

Do It Right, Not Over!